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The Google Summer of Code is an initiative sponsored by Google to encourage university students to participate in the development of free software. To enable them to work full time on their projects, Google offers a stipend of up to 4500 US$ to every student who will successfully complete her/his project. It’s an opportunity to combine a necessity (money) with a practical learning experience in software development. If you’re a student interested in the challenge, keep reading.

Learning By Doing

As a Google Summer of Code student you’ll learn / apply the following skills:

Collaboration and competition in a purely meritocratic environment

Integration into a flexible human dynamic and passionate community distributed all over the world (the common language is most often English, but fear neither grammar nor orthography, it is foreign language for the majority and language is just a means to understand each other)

Use of modern software development tools such as revision control systems (CVS, SVN, Git, Mercurial) in a distributed development environment

To communicate according to netiquette on mailing list, instant messengers and other communication tools

The code from successful projects is likely to make it into the next releases of free software used worldwide. In previous years, more than 80% of students have succeded.

This year, get active, make something positive of your summer!

Choice

You’ll have the choice to apply for one of more than hundreds different participating mentoring organizations that are active in disparate areas of computing: web technologies, content management systems (CMS), office software, simulation and modeling, analytical sciences, health and biosciences, graphics, 3D, CAD, animation, games, email, telephony, messaging, general sciences, publishing, multimedia, audio, video and more…

There is something for every taste and skill, in C/C++, Java, Python, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby and many other programming languages.

And if you have an idea that does not fit the traditional criteria, you should still apply! As long as your code is open source licensed, the program is open to your creativity and ideas.

Hugin / Panotools

We would be delighted if you would consider us when applying for Google Summer of Code. If we are accepted. The list of accepted mentoring organizations will be posted March 18, 19:00 UTC on the brand new Google Summer of Code 2009 website. Until then we can not promise you anything, but we encourage you to look at our project. Hugin/Panotools is a project in the area of advanced image processing / 3D. If OpenGL, perspective correction, photometric correction, stitching off panoramas, gigapixels, Apple QuickTimeVR, GoogleEarth are terms that trigger your passion, come talk to us on our GoogleGroup. We care for our students, helping them understand the whole process from proposal writing to planning to implementation. Moreover, in the past two years we arranged for extra sponsorship from panorama gear makers.

How It Works

Between March 23 19:00 UTC and April 3 19:00 UTC sign up to Google Summer of Code and apply for a project. You can apply to multiple projects with multiple organizations, but you will be accepted to one only.

It’s a competitive selection process: we will rank your proposals, Google will assign us a number of slots to each mentoring organization and the top proposals will be retained. There are a total of 1000 slots available this year.

Look for your name on the list published here April 20 19:00 UTC, and if you are on the list, you’re booked for the summer.

You’ll be expected to bond with the community (i.e. participate actively and learn) before coding starts.